Have you ever looked around a corporate jet and wished you had more room? Room perhaps to transport not only your closest advisers but also dozens of staff members, in a space the size of a large home? That's what private customers for Airbus' mammoth A380 will have.

"Something has taken place at Bayreuth which our grandchildren and their children will still remember," wrote composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky after attending the first performances of Wagnerian operas at the playhouse there.

A quarter mile from the Estancia del Zorro-the ranch of the fox-flows a stream my friend Brian O'Keefe calls the best spring creek he has ever fished. This is saying something. O'Keefe, who lives in the Oregon high desert, has made an enviable life of searching the world for great fishing.

Following in the footsteps of a successful father is rarely easy, particularly when it involves a business founded by the father. Randall Greene, now chairman, president and CEO of Safe Flight Instrument Corp., faces this challenge. His father, Leonard Greene, started the company in 1946.

Digital text messaging might be the preferred communications medium of the future, but when it comes to air traffic control (ATC), pilots and their counterparts on the ground still need a live human voice at the other end of the earphones. Texting may be fine for many forms of messages aloft, and in fact, it has been widely used for years by airlines and many business-jet operators.

The first stone of taxation has been dropped into the lake of fractional ownership and the ripples are likely to spread. Last August, Senate Bill (SB) 87 was signed into law in California, creating a system for assessing property tax on fractionally owned aircraft for the first time in the U.S.

Dassault Aviation announced last year at the National Business Aviation Association Convention that it has launched the development of a super-midsize Falcon business jet, code-named SMS (for super-midsize). The aircraft will have fly-by-wire flight controls, an advanced glass cockpit and new Rolls-Royce engines in the 10,000-pound-thrust range.

In December, NetJets pilots voted overwhelmingly in support of a major amendment and five-year extension to their collective bargaining agreement with NetJets Aviation. The pilots are represented by Teamsters Local 1108.

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“When you get into the larger aircraft it becomes like a hotel, with dozens of staff supporting the plane based in a galley area down below. You have very comprehensive cooking facilities, and on larger aircraft we have looked at theatres, with spiral staircases and a Steinway grand piano. The limitations for what you can put inside a plane are pretty much the limits of physics, and even money cannot always overcome that. Even so, people are still always trying to push [the limits]. ”